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Putin Pulls Off Latest Feat: Flying With the Birds

Vladimir Putin, clockwise from top left: in Russia's far east forests tranquilizing a tiger; horseback riding in southern Siberia; swimming in a Siberian lake; and digging at an archaeological site in Greece.Credit
Top left, Alexey Druzhinin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; pool photos by Alexey Druzhinin

MOSCOW — Vladimir V. Putin is the unquestioned supreme leader of Russia, known for his icy stare and steely ways. But now Mr. Putin has taken on a new, perhaps more tender, leadership role. He has guided a flock of birds — through the air.

Russia’s president piloted a motorized hang glider over an Arctic wilderness while leading six endangered Siberian cranes toward their winter habitat, as part of an operation called “The Flight of Hope,” his press office confirmed Wednesday.

While Mr. Putin recently has found some resistance to his stewardship at home, he found a more receptive crowd among his feathered followers. Experts say that when raised in captivity, these cranes quickly form bonds with figures they perceive as parents. That is a role, apparently, that Mr. Putin has been training for.

“For cranes, the parent is a man in a white robe,” Yuri Markin, the director of the game preserve that reared the chicks, told Russian News Service, a radio network. “They don’t remember a particular person. They remember the white robe and hood, or on the ultralight, a white helmet — and a special beak that is worn on the head.”

Mr. Putin wore the billowy, white costume for​his flights. Late Wednesday, the Interfax news agency reported that the president had flown three times in an ultralight aircraft at the Kushavet ornithological research station on the Yamal Peninsula, in the Arctic. On two flights, cranes followed him, the news agency reported.

Photo

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia escorted six endangered Siberian cranes to their winter habitat. Experts say that when raised in captivity, these cranes quickly form bonds with figures they perceive as parents.Credit
Pool photo by Alexey Druzhinin

A political cartoon started making the rounds early in the morning, showing resentful-looking cranes and Mr. Putin wearing cardboard wings, telling them: “Let’s assign roles right now. I’ll be the alpha crane!” Another, darker one went this way: Mr. Putin looked at the crane and said, “I will save you!” The crane looked at the president and thought, “Maybe I’d better die out.”

Though Mr. Putin’s flight was most likely the first ever for a Russian head of state, it was not the first time he had tried to burnish his public image as a caring outdoorsman, or macho man of adventure.

Mr. Putin on past expeditions has tranquilized a tiger, used a crossbow to extract tissue from a whale and put a tracking collar on a polar bear. News of his latest plan rippled over the Internet all day Wednesday, to great merriment. Some wondered just how far he would go. Would he try to imitate the gasping-shrieking cry of the cranes, to instill more faith in his leadership?

Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, however, was later compelled to admit that the discovery was staged. Indeed, it seemed last year that Mr. Putin’s stunts had begun to fall flat. To the young sophisticates who dominate Russia’s Internet, they looked stiff and fake, a throwback to the days when the vast apparatus of Soviet propaganda worked to glorify one man.

Mr. Putin steered clear of them for the tense months around his election, but this project suggests a return of confidence.

Photo

Mr. Putin played the piano at a charity concert in 2010.Credit
Aleksey Nikolskyi/RIA Novosti, via Reuters

Mr. Peskov confirmed to Russian newspapers that the president had been training to pilot the motorized hang glider for the purpose of guiding the cranes.

The president began guiding the birds to their winter retreat just before a summit meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organization opens Friday.

For his critics, the image of Mr. Putin dressed in a bird suit and flying was, perhaps, too good an opportunity to pass up. Aleksei Navalny, an opposition leader and blogger, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday: “About Stalin they said, ‘In the night a light will burn in the window.’ And of Putin they will say, ‘He flew over our homes with a flock of cranes.’ ”

One post circulating on Twitter said, “For the flock to recognize him as a leader he stuffed three feathers in his rear.”

The stunt rippled in Russian politics in other ways, too. Masha Gessen, the editor of the magazine Vokrug Sveta, or Around the World, and the author of a critical biography of Mr. Putin, was fired this week for what she said was a refusal to send a photographer to cover Mr. Putin with the cranes. The publisher said broader long-term disagreements led to her dismissal.

While Mr. Putin’s interest seems more recent, Russian ornithologists have experimented with using slow-flying airplanes to guide captive-bred cranes to the south since 2002, the newspaper Vedomosti reported. They modeled the effort on experiments by North American conservationists, most famously shown in “Fly Away Home,” a 1996 film about Canada geese led to the south by a girl in an ultralight aircraft.

After Mr. Putin’s flights, he handed the baton of leadership — only over his feathered followers — to a professional pilot who will take over for the rest of the journey to the birds’ winter habitat in Central Asia.

Ellen Barry contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on September 6, 2012, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Putin Pulls Off Latest Feat: Flying With the Birds. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe